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Eric73's avatar

The elephant in the room here is the massive verbal aptitude gap between boys and girls and our collective reaction to it. It's understandable that this may have been initially greeted as good news by advocates for women's progress; I felt that way at first, too.

But we forget what happened when we once thought boys were so much better than girls at math and science. We looked into it and found that if we changed the way we taught girls we could improve their performance and narrow the gap. Yet we are barely even beginning to think about doing this with boys because we progressives can't get past our smug assertions of male privilege to see that we're failing our boys.

Not so long ago, when Larry Summers suggested the mere *possibly* of men being better at certain fields like math and engineering, to explain the overwhelming male bias in those areas, he was assailed with accusations of sexism. Yet now that the gap in verbal aptitude so clearly favors girls, suddenly we see the limitations of projecting principles of equality onto matters of empirical reality.

But we've also seen how our principles can motivate us to understand the limitations of our own understanding of empirical reality and our ability to draw conclusions about what we learn and act appropriately on them. In this way we've overcome years of writing off women and girls on the basis of seemingly objective and rational observations. We owe our boys the same.

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Frank Lee's avatar

It is simple. School sucks for males. Always has... because it is based on a 150 year old lecture model that rewards compliant clones of discipline and not those with a drive to create, invent and explore.

But what used to happen is that males would finally escape from the confines of school and go out into the working world to make their way. First it was industry that was exported to cheaper labor countries. They told the boys and men that they would find new work in the high-tech manufacturing fields. Then those jobs were outsourced too... and the few remaining were given to robots. The trades were flooded with new immigrants and wages crashed.

And instead of reforming the school system to help make up the deficits for the boys... they did the opposite and Title-nined it to better fit the girls. Combined with the changes in the economy we might as well just handed opioids and bullets to all these boys and men... giving them the message that their toxic masculinity was unneeded and they should just slip away.

So, how do we fix things?

Bring back industry and manufacturing, stop the flood of trade wage-killing illegal immigration, reform the education system and knock the man-hating feminists out of political power.

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